Carly Simon

I have simply found a way of loving through whatever absences or dejections have fallen like tree branches in my path.

Seeing things that are bothering you written down takes away their power. It gives you a perspective. Helps you contain them.

Music brought me closer to the idea of God.

I always live in some kind of anticipation of something good happening.

The other day I came across a recording I made of a night at my apartment when I was living with Kris Kristofferson. Bob Dylan had been around earlier and we were all passing around the guitar. Whenever it came to my turn I would run into the kitchen and say I’d left the coffee on the stove or something. Shyness. Scared to perform.

Music gave me the energy to revise, revive myself; renew, rebirth myself. It was a palliative, a relief.

Always keep reaching.

I learn something new every day.

A good player can make any instrument sound good.

If a player is pushing their ability, a certain amount of failure is inevitable. Maybe even desirable.

Music should not have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that is required to sound like jazz.

Women bring something different to an instrument if they are respectful of their feminine aesthetic.

You don’t rehearse Jazz to death to get the camera angles.

I hate to think of Jazz as black and white, something political.

I started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that’s just the way it came out.

The main thing is you want to emote.

I still do what I love, and I don’t really think about it. I try to make a beautiful show, so people go home happy. That’s my biggest aspiration: to make people happy.

I was a nerd academically. But I was also an athlete and a musician. I never wanted to be shut out of any situation. I think it was that more than anything.

It’s performing without any really set basis for the lines and the content as such emotionally or, specifically, musically. And if you sit down and contemplate what you’re going to do, and take five hours to write five minutes of music, then it’s composed music. Therefore I would put it in the classical or serious, whatever you want to call it, written-music category. So there’s composed music and there’s jazz. And to me anybody that makes music using the process that we are using in Jazz, is playing Jazz.

I am a writer – that is what I am before being a performer or musician. I love waking up in the morning and then going to sleep that night with something that did not exist.

For years the trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We starved.